GCN at 25

Feb 04, 2007

GCN marks its 25th anniversary this year (it debuted in 1982, when Time magazine named the computer its Man of the Year), and we will devote a little space in each issue to some of the significant IT developments of the past quarter-century.

The federal government, which had seen success with its flextime program, was not making much headway with what some were calling a 'flexiplace' program'telecommuting. Despite studies showing increased worker productivity and higher retention rates in industry, efforts to get the government to promote telecommuting were meeting resistance.

Some things always change

NASA's Big, Fast System Goes On-Line

'GCN, Oct. 10, 1986, Page 1

NASA unveiled the 'world's most powerful supercomputing facility,' the Numerical Aerodynamic Simulation facility, at Ames Research Center. The centerpiece of the facility was a Cray-2 supercomputer capable of performing 1.6 GigaFLOPS (1.6 billion floating-point operations per second). As a gauge of Moore's Law and how processing power has increased, that supercomputer would make a pretty slow desktop PC today. An off-the-shelf 3.06-GHz Intel Pentium 4 CPU offers 12 GigaFLOPS. You can get one for as low as $169.